TLDR: Users’ opt-in rates depend on the time and the relevance of the message. best times to push are morning before work, 3 pm (when people take short break from their job) and 6pm-9pm after work day ends. Check this amazing visualization about people's behaviors during the day.

Hi all, I summarized few great posts from @AndrewChen to one, about push notifications. when do users opt in and out, and why.

In the morning, push notification activity is seen to be low. This is contributed by the fact that people are busy doing their morning rituals. This goes up to until 12pm. A sudden hike is seen at around 3pm, as this is the time many people take a break from their jobs. It is thus a perfect time to take a quick look at their phones. The after 6pm hour, push notification engagement is seen to shoot up even more. People are out of their jobs and have a lot of leisure time to catch up on social media and quickly see notifications. This trend is represented in the diagram below;

People are opting out of push notification in some apps while they are choosing to stay in others. You can bet on this, they only want to receive push notification that are relevant, time sensitive and valuable. The industries with the highest enablement, as seen on IOS devices, are all time-sensitive. People with taxi app for instance, would want to be alerted immediately when their rides arrives, thus the relevance of push notification is highly appreciated by the user. Industries that are having low opt-in could be experiencing this because they send self-promotional messages. It gets on most peoples’ last nerve when they receive push notification of things they have no business with. An example is when a user gets Netflix notification of a movie they do not watch.